1. Field of the Invention
The present application relates generally to use of thermal profiles. Still more particularly, the present application relates to a computer implemented method, data processing system, computer usable code, and apparatus for the use of thermal indexes for optimizing the thermal performance of a computer system.
2. Description of the Related Art
The first-generation Cell processor is a multi-core chip comprised of a 64-bit Power PC® processor core and eight synergistic processor cores, capable of massive floating point processing, optimized for compute-intensive workloads and broadband rich media applications. A high-speed memory controller and high-bandwidth bus interface are also integrated on-chip. Cell's breakthrough multi-core architecture and ultra high-speed communications capabilities deliver vastly improved, real-time response, in many cases ten times the performance of the latest PC processors. Cell is operating system neutral and supports multiple operating systems simultaneously. Applications for this type of processor range from a next generation of game systems with dramatically enhanced realism, to systems that form the hub for digital media and streaming content in the home, to systems used to develop and distribute digital content, and to systems to accelerate visualization and supercomputing applications.
Today's high performance multi-core processors are frequently limited by thermal considerations. Typical solutions include cooling and power management. Cooling may be expensive and/or difficult to package. Power management is generally a coarse action, “throttling” much if not all of the processor in reaction to a thermal limit being reached. Other techniques such as thermal management help address these coarse actions by only throttling the units exceeding a given temperature. Even with the improvement of thermal management, it would be beneficial to control selective portions of resources to avoid and not just react to thermal limits. Some current solutions to resource control are the selection of a processor without regard to thermal characteristics or an attempt to balance thermal load by shuffling software amongst processor cores.